Manual of Aerial Survey: Primary Data Acquisition, Roger Read and Ron Graham, Boca Raton,

FL, CRC Press LLC, 2002. 408 pp., 18 chapters, with a glossary, eight appendices, and an

index. Hardbound (ISBN 0-8493-1600-6), $119.95.

The authors present the book as a “practical text” (p. vii). Indeed, the writing style reads like a

how-to manual of aerial photographic business operations. Read and Graham successfully keep

the text relatively simple with a liberal sprinkling of equations (134 mathematical formulas) and

clear graphics. They admit to using their lecture notes (at the ITC in the Netherlands) as the

basis for the book’s first edition in 1986, and it is likely that they continued that practice with this

heavily revised new edition. The book is also meant to be used as a companion to Small Format

Aerial Photography by Warner, Graham and Read (Whittles Pub., 1996). While they have

written the book for an international readership, it is Euro-centric. This bias is generally

unimportant, although the authors have ignored several important American publications: Greve,

C.W., ed., 1996, Digital Photogrammetry: An Addendum to the Manual of Photogrammetry,

ASPRS; Philipson, W., ed., 1997, Manual of Photographic Interpretation, 2nd ed., ASPRS; Shenk,

T., 1999, Digital Photogrammetry, TerraScience; and Wolf, P.R., and B.A. Dewitt, 2000,

Elements of Photogrammetry: with Applications in GIS, McGraw Hill. And in Appendix 1,

Institutes and Societies, the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing is

surprisingly absent.

Chapters one and two give a quick historical background on aerial photography followed by

definitions with some general requirements and specifications. These specifications are further

expanded and cross-referenced in Appendix 4. The instructions given here and elsewhere often
tell the readers what they should do (my emphasis). Among the first quibbles with the book are

the slim descriptions of applications on pp. 18-19. These five categories of applications could

easily have been expanded a bit. The copy editor seems to have caught nearly all of the

typographic errors before the book went to press, although on p. 22, figure 2.6 is referenced

when figure 2.7 is the likely preferred photo. Regardless, the text, graphics and equations are

presented in a clear and understandable format.

Read and Graham then dive into the meat of the book with a detailed discussion of air camera

instrumentation (chapter three), staying as up-to-date as possible with comparisons of Leica,

Zeiss, and Z/I Imaging. Another minor quibble crops up in this chapter as figure 3.14, a color

photo, requires searching by the reader since it and another color figure for chapter four (4.16)

appear in chapter 8, while the color figures for chapters five (5.6) and eleven (11.16) appear in

chapter nine. Either the book designer preferred random placement of these figures or didn’t

care. Traditionally, all color images appear together in a central location. But since only four

color images appear in the text, the first two could have been placed between chapters three and

four, with the second two after the end of chapter five.

Chapters four, five and six deal with films, exposures, and processing. The authors do a good

job of discussing and comparing the different film types available from Kodak and AGFA, while

noting the advantages and disadvantages of each. With the review of exposures, they provide

recommendations (e.g., Kodak Aerial Exposure Computer) and warnings (e.g., regarding under-

and over-exposures for oblique and snow scene photos, respectively). In the processing chapter,
they assess the different chemicals and processing machines, with additional recommendations

for archiving.

Photogrammetric requirements are presented next with a perhaps overly restrictive instruction to

have mapping cameras recalibrated at least once per year. Read and Graham provide a thorough

overview of this topic, as well as evaluating advances in instrumentation, and specifically

conduct a comparison of a variety of film scanners. Chapter eight delves into the ten in-flight

variables and the ten post-flight variables concerned with materials and processing that affect

image quality.

Business and practical operations of aircraft (chapter nine with additional comparative aircraft

specifications in Appendix 8), including the advantages and disadvantages of single versus twin-

prop airplanes, retrofitting and installation of air photo equipment, and navigation sights are dealt

with separately. Due to automated GPS land survey flight management systems, whether this

last factor will be discussed as other than an historical artifact in future editions remains to be

seen. Specific annual and direct operating costs are laid out for the air photo business person on

p. 214. The authors properly note that high altitude aerial surveys are no longer economical

given the availability of high-resolution satellite imagery.

Critical mission planning (chapter eleven with additional formulae in Appendix 5) followed by

two phases of operational procedures are then laid out to efficiently and cost-effectively run an

air photo business. One noticeable but minor typo pops up in chapter 13 where two different

equations are assigned the same number (13.3) on pp. 311 and 317. The authors next provide
two chapters on system-based survey navigation, as specifically related to satellite navigation

systems, followed by a brief nine page review of differential GPS with a noteworthy calculation

of the cost savings in regard to its use.

The book finishes with several disparate chapters on oblique aerial photography (with oblique

scales defined in Appendix 7), airborne laser terrain mapping, and close with current and future

developments. Overall, even with the minor criticisms stated above, this book should be

required reading for the employees of any aerial photographic acquisition or aerial survey and

photogrammetric companies. That said, this reviewer doubts that the book will be used outside

of that narrow audience. More traditional air photo interpretation texts will likely continue to

dominate in college classrooms.